Galloway Forest Park
Galloway Forest Park
Look at the night sky from November 17 to 18 and you could be rewarded with a show of heavenly light. On those nights, the meteor shower of the Leonids reaches its annual peak and produces the largest number of meteors per hour. The rain is the result of the orbit of the Earth that crosses with the debris left by Comet Tempel-Tuttle. The dusty bits evaporate into the atmosphere to produce the bright rays of light.
The Leonids, named for the Leo constellation from which the rain seems to radiate outward, are expected to be moderate in 2018. But their chances of a quality show increase if seen from an area with minimal light pollution. The images above show one of those areas in southern Scotland where dark skies are actively preserved. Galloway Forest Park was the first dark sky park in Europe. (The largest is the Cévennes National Park in France.)
The superior image, acquired on May 24, 2018, with the Operational Earth Imager in Landsat 8, shows a natural color view of the Galloway forest park. The park received its designation in 2009 by the International Association of the Dark Sky. Located about 120 kilometers (75 miles) southwest of Edinburgh, the park spans 774 square kilometers (299 square miles) of wooded areas, moors and lakes. About 20 percent of that is the dark sky area "core", which means that there is no permanent lighting. There is even an astronomical observatory just north of the park.
The remoteness of this area is particularly evident in the second image, which shows the pattern of human settlement in southern Scotland and northern England. The image comes from a global composite that was made by selecting the best nights without clouds in each month for each land mass on Earth. The data comes from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite.
According to the International Dark Sky Association, 90 percent of Europeans live in the midst of night skies hampered by light pollution. Parks like this preserve a place where people can get away from the bright lights of the city and see the night sky shows, such as the Milky Way, satellites, meteor showers and countless stars.
Of course, nowhere is the sky truly dark; Celestial sources, such as the light of the stars and the moonlight, naturally illuminate the sky. This year, the growing gibbous moon could eclipse some of the Leonid meteors, making the hours before sunrise after the moon's setting a better bet for a good show.
Images from the NASA Earth Observatory by Joshua Stevens and Lauren Dauphin, using Suomi NPP VIIRS data from Miguel Román, NASA GSFC, Landsat data from the United States Geological Surveyand the data from the Artillery Survey © 2018. History by Kathryn Hansen.
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